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We made this. Everything was planned out in advance. Instead of letting things happen and running after them, focusing on the fly and all that goodness, we told our actor, the very talented Sam Mignoni, where to stand and what to do. We also used some lighting and bounce. Controlling everything is fun, and I wish I’d had even more control and we’d had another go at the zip line coverage – I’d like a different lens from the ground, but all in all, a strong video. Visually strong, quick, engaging. Go team Nacho and Eileen.

We produced this short motion graphic for the Terra Andina brand of wine from Santa Rita Vinyards. The goal was to capture the youth spirit and energy that South America in order to introduce this new line of wines to the US market.

Eileen was in charge of the After Effects portion of the project, Nacho oversaw the project and wrote the script. Much of the kinetic type was sourced from templates, and the camara movements on the illustrations was done by Eileen. The illustrations were created by Andrea Bascuñan under the direction of Nacho Corbella.

Ramon Navarro, 3rd best big wave surfer in the world with the host of Juego de Roles, Elena Dressel.

These syncing problems and project collapse seem to be resolved with the combination of CS6 and Pluraleyes 3. Things are much better now.

We have now just finished our very first television show. 13 episodes of 23-25 minutes apiece for 13 consecutive weeks. If you want to check it out, our favorite episodes are Ramon Navarro, surfer, and Caterin Bravo, fencer.

It was brutal. Concurrently, Nacho was teaching, working his full time job at the Universidad de los Andes and also had to disappear to Colombia and Cordoba. We worked in hotel rooms and many hard drives. We did a serious computer upgrade because all of the footage made my trusty iMac want to weep, rendering it useless.

Fencer Caterin Bravo during the challenge with Juego de Roles host, Elena Dressel.

We used Adobe Premiere because it meant we wouldn’t have to transcode the 75-100gb of material we had for each show. We could throw whatever footage we wanted in there, and we could see it immediately. As noted before, our show was composed of 5d, 7d, GoPro, iPhone and externally recorded audio.

Premiere plays very nice, except where PluralEyes is concerned. What I think is at the root of the problem is that PluralEyes deals with stereo clips in a variety of ways, not always in a consistent manner, and not in a manner Premiere always recognizes.

We were using PluralEyes 2 for Premiere. To use this, one must export a Final Cut XML file from premiere and then find the desired sequence to sync within PluralEyes. These sequences would have to be made into new XML files that had to be reimported into the Premiere program.

When we reimported the new, synced sequences to Premiere, the audio we recorded on the 5d, 7d would be split into separate tracks. We had split our externally recorded audio into two separate tracks prior to syncing.

5d audio tracks before syncing. One stereo clip on one track.

5d audio tracks after syncing. Two mono audio clips on different tracks.

These things messed with Premiere, terribly. We were working on two machines – Nacho editing separately, and passing his sequences back to me. (With Premiere, you can only open one project at a time, which means to bring anything into a project, you must import, and then select sequences to import.)

Our externally audio, recorded on a Zoom H4. We would split the audio into two different tracks. There are two methods of doing this. One can choose audio channels from the modify button in the clip menu. Or one can use Audio Options in the Clip menu and choose Breakout to Mono. Neither of these made better the problems listed below.

One way of separating stereo tracks using the modify option in the clip menu, or by right clicking.

When Nacho would pass sequences back to me, although the audio – two distinct tracks, would be perfect on his computer, on mine, they were a mess. With our separately recorded audio, many times, instead of two separate tracks, there would be one the same one, duplicated. Audios from our Canon videos, which we needed for ambient, or because someone wasn’t mic-ed, would disappear entirely. I would try to replace the footage missing with the same clip, only to have the program, crash and crash and crash.

Oh, error.

This is the error that came up a lot before the crashing ensued. It could be ignored, unless audio was missing.

2 very different tracks from the stereo recordings of the Zoom from 2 lav mics. This is how the Zoom tracks would look when Nacho received them.

Instead of two different audio clips, I have the same one repeated. This is how the separated stereo tracks would look (sometimes, often, but not always) when Nacho would pass me back sequences he had worked on.

We devised a number of work arounds – I would resync based on audio clips I had with the originals in Premiere. Once, Nacho exported the audios from his computer and we replaced the bad audios. We never, never shut down the computer mid-project because we never knew what disaster we would find when we opened it.

I presume this will get worked out over time, more on the part of PluralEyes. I have no solutions. The one that seemed most probable – changing the mode of splitting a stereo track (see the two methods above) gave nothing. One thing I often did was create a copy of my original zoom track in my finder, then replace the audio footage with the duplicated clip. This often worked with audio only clips. With the 5 and 7d, the computer would crash.

We’ve just started trying with PluralEyes 3. Prettier interface, more work, more frequent Premiere crashes. We got the show out, and we’re proud and happy and satisfied and have achieved something. We’ll update Premiere to 6.0 and hope for improvements with both along the way. We’re sticking with Premiere, and we have no choice but to wait.

This week we turned in 4 video projects. In one project, we only had to subtitle 2 finished videos. In another, we staged office scenes, and integrated earlier office footage to tell the story of how a Kimberly-Clark product line can be implemented in an office for better health and productivity. And, finally, today, we turned in the first episode of Juego de Roles.

We used Final Cut Pro for the first 3 videos because they were short and simple and we do feel a kinship with the program. For the television program, we used Adobe Premiere 5.5. We’ll be upgrading to 6.0 soon. The show is 25 minutes long and we record between 60 and 100gb per episode. We don’t have the memory space to transcode it all.

We’re in Colombia right now. Nacho is teaching a workshop for lots of newspapers throughout the country. This week Bogota gets to learn from the Nacho. Tomorrow, the second Bogota group starts editing. So, we have 4 PC laptops sitting in our hotel room while Nacho looks for a version of Premiere that will work with Vista. (Another Premiere benefit – no one is bound to a Mac. Great for cash strapped newsrooms and journalists. Nacho wouldn’t be able to teach multimedia editing if he demanded Macs.)

As you can see we’re shifting toward Premiere. I’ve been moving toward it for a while. I learned it to coach a project with the Universidad de Desarrollo. At La Tercera, they gave me a hardy PC with Premiere. And now, with the Juego de Roles, Premiere makes life easier.

I’m seeing others slowly making the move. Given the disaster that Final Cut X is reputed to be, I expect to see more converts in the future.

There are little different things that can seem enormously frustrating, so here I’d like to explain a few time saving measures.

Today: pasting filters over many clips.

Nacho has read you can’t do this. He has read wrong.

Select the filter you want within the effects panel of the properly adjusted clip. You can select multiple filters or motion (which will give you all location and size aspects.) Hit command+c. Or you can right click, copy.

Select all of the clips on which you want to paste the effect.

Hit Command+V. You know you’ve done it correctly if the yellow bar, indicating a render preview changes to red, which means it needs to be rendered.

Listo. So easy.

The only way this doesn’t work is if you accidentally double click on the clip that needs the filter or effect and it gets opened in the display panel. In that case, you have to open the effects panel and paste the filter there, but that only works one at a time. You also can’t paste the attributes with a right click. That doesn’t work.

I read Clients from Hell a lot. It’s one of my default procrastination sites. It’s hilarious.

But, our clients are good. Really good. And often times they push us to make a better video than we knew we could, or that we hadn’t conceived of.

In this instance, Kimberly-Clark, the client, had a vision of a fast paced, timelapse type commute to work. MDB* the branding agency, with whom we worked on this, asked us to work on this video because I had shown them my Powering a Nation video, Down the Lines.

We made a mock-up on New Year’s Eve day using my brother Sam as the commuter. Nacho also made an appearance in the film. I’ll be honest – we kind of thought it was spot on.

The client wanted more. They wanted it faster, quicker paced, more like a music video. We wrote up a script, in collaboration with the client and the branding agency. The client did initially want to show the commuters with their families, but we cut that because of time and budget. If the video was to be short, the people couldn’t be dawdling in their houses making their kids breakfast and kissing them goodbye.

This collaboration on all aspects of the filming made our work better, undoubtedly. The client was able able to effectively communicate what they wanted, and we were able to put their vision (with ours) into this fun little video warning the viewers about the germ dangers of their city.

As far as we know, the video is being used internally, and as a piece to show to their clients to explain to them the benefits of implementing La Salud está en tus Manos, a system of sanitizer and cleansing products to keep work stations clean and workers healthy.

Fun behind the scenes fact (Stop – watch the video before reading) the female commuter had only driven about 5 times in her whole life. She was starting to try to learn, but there was a good deal of stalling and I had a terrifying drive around a Santiago block. Most of her driving shots are simulations.

There’s no way around it. There more I do it, the more it’s confirmed.
Project based classes are the best way for students to learn multimedia.
Period.

One full week, in the field. Gathering content, then editing. Having formal and informal meetings on their scripts and planning. That’s what we did in Valparaíso with my colleagues Sebastián González, Blas Parra and Luis Melgar.

With their help, we led 10 students – 7 Chileans and 3 Uruguayans – and helped them produce 11 stories in the port town where they managed to portray the character of the city and its inhabitants in an exquisitely simple Website (http://www.cronicasdevalpo.org), programmed and designed by Eileen Mignoni.

During this week, the evolution of the quality of their work is noticeable. Every day the students return with better results.
This full week compares to – and exceeds – the results that a student gets after a full year of instruction in regular classes.

I adore construction sites. I suppose it’s because so much of my hometown of Ubly, Michigan works in construction (road and house). Nacho and I have been hired by an engineering firm here, in Santiago, to photograph their work. This was our first go. Nacho had the 70-200 2.8 on the 7d. I had the 16-35 on the 5d. They’ll be a prize for whomever manages to properly identify whose photos are whose, without looking at the exif data.

I left La Tercera in June. I spent the US summer/ the Chilean winter in New York, New York. Responding to a call from Mohawk Street and The Daily’s Mike Schmidt, I went to shoot and edit a video documenting the experience of a group of interns at a health care consulting firm in New York.

I’m now back in Santiago, in time for the spring. I’m wrapping up the editing of a pair of UNC annual fund videos, a wordpress website for the Chilean magazine Hacer Familia, and Iam preparing for an intense week of video coaching with the Universidad del Desarrollo while I contemplate my next professional steps.

Nacho has too been out and about, teaching and workshopping up a storm.

Nacho in Chicago. Photo by Juan Andrés Muñoz

He led two workshops for the International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) one in Los Angeles and the other in Chicago, where he taught 35 latino Journalists rom all around the US how to do multimedia narratives.

Happy Students in UCLA at the ICFJ Bootcamp. Photo by Yezmin Thomas

He conducted a weeklong intensive project for Uandes students in Vaparaiso, Chile, which will soon be unveiled. He spent nearly 3 weeks in Colombia teaching video and multimedia to journalists at 3 different papers in the country. (Medellin, Bogotá and Manizales). He accompanied the 4 Uandes winners of an El Mercurio challenge to New York for a week to meet with professionals at the New York Times, The Daily and Good Morning America.

All the while, teaching photography and multimedia to the journalism students at the Universidad de los Andes.

Lima before the first speech. Photo by Pedro Acuña.

And this past weekend he went to Peru to participate in a seminar at Universidad San Martín de Porres where, addressing two groups of 400 people, he spoke about succesful multimedia experiences.

This was a great exercise. To look back and analyze what you’re doing should be a requirement of every journalist, especially the educators. I invite you to do the same, it will take you just a bit of time. It’ll be worth it, believe me.

Everyday and at every moment we are exposed – either by choice or not – to visuals on television, cinema, billboards and daily life itself. We are, in our core, audiovisual beings. Most of the information we get is through our eyes and ears, hence, it is essential for communicators to learn the audiovisual language.

It is important to remember that video, in its essence, is storytelling. While using video in storytelling in print and radio media outlets is still relatively young, there is a huge tradition of storytelling with audio and images from which we will increasingly draw. The video we see in journalistic outlets will continue to develop, becoming more vivid, complex and compelling as we look to influences outside the world of journalism.

Video storytelling is imperative to the journalism of the future because we remember 25% of what we see, 50% of what he hear, but 100% of what we feel. It is the feeling that will deepen the attention span and help media organizations define themselves as industry leaders. The greatest strength of video storytelling is its ability to give a voice to our subjects so they can tell their stories. It is our role as communicators to shape those in a manner that conveys the emotion of the story and the subject to our viewers with the least amount of intervention. Our job is to channel these experiences and not insert ourselves into them.

It is not necessary that the stories we seek be exotic or in the midst of tumultuous world events. In Tolstoi’s words “paint your village and you shall paint the world”. By that, I believe that constant documentation of people in surrounding areas reflects on major topics. Reporting on common people, but doing so in a compelling matter, will cause audience to flock to see the stories.

Obviously, there is a television tradition of journalism, with a presenter, some clips, a few images. I think that we will see less and less of this type of storytelling as the media shift to a younger audience less accustomed to this type of programming, and more accustomed to seeing raw video and hearing from those involved in the conflicts and other news events. There are broadcast outlets who already are experimenting with this by removing anchors and letting the stories present themselves. I think more immediate contact and no anchors will continue to be the most common video form on the internet. I suspect there will be a shift of this sort in broadcast in the coming years. The importance of immediacy is something that needs to be imparted on students, because they are often inclined to copy the model they see on television.

Another use of video we will increasingly see is better incorporation throughout media online. There is no need to segregate material. Increased awareness and knowledge of tablets raises expectations of immediately accessible video in reports. Html5 (when it is ready) will allow for simpler integration of video in online media presentations. We need to think of the possibilities of video beyond a neatly packaged, self standing piece and think about how we can break out these elements to allow written reporting, infographics and video reporting to compliment each other. As well, motion graphics will become more ubiquitous – as infographics have in print media– as great alternatives to traditional storytelling and will be heavily integrated to the point where people won’t notice them as a different format, but will expect them as part of the media palette.

Our duty as journalism educators is to educate our students in these new forms. Then, we must allow them and encourage to innovate. In video, we must first bring them back to the essentials, using sequences and subjects to tell stories. From this point, we can encourage the students to incorporate video in the multitude of modes the interactive world permits.

I have begun working with SIP – IAPA (the Interamerican Press Association), producing intensive multimedia (audiovisual storytelling) workshops throughout Latin America. The first one was in Guayaquil, Ecuador. The next one will be in March in Lima, Perú.

The workshop in Guayaquil was hosted by El Universo, one of the largest daily newspapers in Ecuador. 22 students attended – a mix of reporters and editors from 10 different newspapers in Colombia, Ecuador, Honduras and Mexico. They had very different levels of understanding regarding visual narratives which made it complex to convey all the new ideas they needed to be thinking about when approaching a visual project.

We spent the first day reviewing theory, and the second day reporting and editing. After seeing some of their work, I’m confident that I was able to take them from 0-60mph (or at least 40) in just 20 hours.

I wish I would have had more time, but I’m confident I gave them a set of tools and skills that will allow them to get better.

I invite you to enjoy Eduardo Adams’ work. We tried a different narrative structure. While watching, keep in mind that this was all shot and produced in 1 day. It’s about the October revolt in Ecuador that almost over threw the presidency of Rafael Correa, seen through the eyes of an artist who was in the streets when this happened. He felt expressing with a picture would be easier than words.

While I was there, Álvaro Torrelli a videographer from El Comercio -also keep an eye on this guy- interviewed me and here’s the result.